4 of the Biggest Mistakes Ever Made

While we understand that every human makes mistakes, we are pretty much the epitome of pedantic when it comes to accuracy, which is fairly unsurprising considering our in-house calibration services. Precision is an absolute must for us and in some cases, errors could lead to massive, and often fatal, disasters. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest mistakes to have ever been made.

The TitanicLet’s start with the most well-known disaster, thanks to the award-winning film, the Titanic. In 1912, the passenger liner sank when attempting to voyage from England to America, which came as a shock to many considering it was dubbed the unsinkable ship. The reason that 1 517 people lost their lives that night was essentially due to an error in judgement, which was made by the ship crew when they ignored warnings of icebergs and decided to go on.

Lake Peigneur1980 saw the awe-inspiring disaster that occurred during Texaco’s attempt to drill for petroleum at Lake Peigneur in Louisiana. In the early hours of the day, the drilling crew realised that they had made a massive mistake when their drill got stuck after hitting salt earlier than they had expected. Realising what they had done, the team abandoned the rig before a huge whirlpool appeared and started taking everything with it, including around 65 acres of land. Not before long, a geyser had been shot up out of the hole and the canal had actually reversed in direction to cause the biggest waterfall in Louisiana.

Boston Molasses ExplosionWhen construction worker Arthur Jell made the decision to only do half of what he was required to at his job, one of Boston’s most bizarre disasters reared its head. Arther was given the task of building a molasses storage tank and didn’t follow procedures by checking for any possible leaks. The pressure inside the tank caused cracks to form and eventually, it exploded, spilling a massive 2 million gallons of molasses into the streets.

NASA & Lockheed Martin’s Mars OrbiterNASA’s incredibly intelligent team constantly assure us that they know what they are doing, however, we are all human and mistakes can always be made. In 1999, while the entire team was using the metric system, Lockheed Martin engineers used the English System of measurement for a Mars orbiter. Using two different measurement systems ultimately prevented the navigation coordinates of the spacecraft being transferred from a team in Denver to a lab situated in California. The spacecraft was forever lost and NASA was out a whopping $125 million.

Accuracy is vital in measurements, which is why we ensure nothing short of excellence in our calibration services.